


put it in reverse and hit him again

by paperclipbitch



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, F/M, Flashbacks, Gen, HuntingBird, We are never ever ever getting back together, awful angst for everyone, bobbi and hunter are the worst for each other but also they complete each other, bobbi is the big spoon, bobbi loves sci-fi, except we are, forever bffs hunter and isabelle, grieving process, ha, hunter cries after sex, hunter wishes he was a bond girl, i didn't write any actual porn and i'm really sad about that, i made mack and izzy gay and i don't regret a thing, i made myself ship isabelle hartley/victoria hand, imagine this fic has a britpop soundtrack, lance hunter is a knob but he's also a knob with PTSD, mild violence/gore in places, nobody wants to read this fic i just ended up getting very invested in hunter and liked writing him, oh hang on i should've put the handy tags in at the top before i started freeforming, oh well too late now, peter capaldi as a team building exercise, sort-of tie in to 2x08, this is my AOS magnum opus in that it ate my life and it was meant to be a quick episode tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-08
Updated: 2014-12-08
Packaged: 2018-02-28 14:05:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2735345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Is it any wonder, these days, that he opens his mouth and Bobbi just pours right out?</p>
            </blockquote>





	put it in reverse and hit him again

**Author's Note:**

> **1:** I had a go at making this canon-compliant, but I didn’t try that hard, so sorry if I’ve messed up the timeline/canon relationships between characters etc.
> 
>  **2:** This is set between 2x08 and 2x09, like, if there was a month between them instead of… not a month.
> 
>  **3:** PEOPLE: thanks to **lariagwyn** and **torakowalski** for betaing/handholding the first half (the second half is all on me, guys); and the stuff in scene 7.5 was taken (with permission) from ideas by [@goshilovearrows](https://twitter.com/GoshILoveArrows). Thanks!

_I ran into my ex the other day… put it in reverse and hit him again._  
– unknown

**0.5.**

“I am telling you that this is a godawful idea,” Isabelle says, snapping the cap off her beer with her teeth. Lance, with his British teeth that are just about hanging in his head through grace and luck alone, internally flinches every time that she does it.

“Telling me or warning me?” he asks, the top of his own bottle removed with a Swiss army knife that he carries because, hey, who doesn’t want to be a cliché?

“Both,” Isabelle replies, kicking her feet up onto the chair beside him. We’re Not Dead beer; a long-standing tradition in that they’ve known each other six and a half weeks, and she bares her teeth at him in something that’s almost a grin.

“I thought you were s’posed to be mates,” Lance points out, and Isabelle laughs. He likes her a lot, in a way that’s violently and specifically different to how he likes Bobbi Morse, and that’s only slightly because he and Izzy have spent the last few weeks acting as each other’s wingmen. Lance was all for calling her his wing _woman_ – because he’s an arsehole, but a specific kind of arsehole – until Izzy pointed out that if she was going to successfully drink him under the bar and then go home with a hotter woman than he did, then she was fucking going by wingman, thank you very much.

“You ever heard of black widow spiders?” Isabelle asks, arching an eyebrow.

“I thought that was the scary Russian redhead,” Lance says.

Isabelle laughs. “I’m serious. She will wreck you. And I just got you broken in, too.”

“I can handle women!” Lance protests. “You have _seen_ me handle women!”

“That _was_ a weekend,” Isabelle says dryly. “Sure, you’ve got the awkward English charm and the run-over-puppy eyes, but Bobbi Morse tramples over men like you and doesn’t look down unless you ruin her shoes.”

Lance wants to protest like two-thirds of that sentence, but says: “nice metaphor.”

“Oh, it wasn’t a metaphor,” Isabelle replies.

“I just need to shag her out of my system,” Lance assures her. 

“That has never ever worked,” Isabelle tells him. “Did you think this much with your dick when you were in the SAS?”

“Why do you think I’m not in the SAS anymore?” Lance asks, and she smirks, leans over to clink their beer bottles together.

**1.0**

“I think they’ve made these cars roomier,” Lance says, mouth smushed somewhere in the vicinity of Bobbi’s left breast. “I didn’t sprain anything on a door handle this time.”

“That wasn’t with me,” Bobbi responds, annoyingly collected for a woman who just came so hard she fractured the sun roof. Lance briefly considers what he’s going to tell Mack when this is inevitably discovered, before he remembers that Mack has never, ever believed any of his excuses before, and will not believe this one now. Bobbi once put her whole hand through an Ikea headboard: her orgasms basically make her the Hulk. Not that he’s going to risk telling her that; at least, not again.

“Wasn’t it?” Lance has his jeans around his ankles and Bobbi’s sitting kind of half on his stomach and half on his dick in a way that’s not entirely unpleasant but which is probably going to lead to some uncomfortable numbness unless he can persuade her to move soon.

“I was the time you got concussed on the steering wheel,” Bobbi clarifies.

“Oh. Okay.” Lance tips his head back a little, just so he doesn’t accidentally suffocate between Bobbi’s boobs. He’s not _entirely_ averse to this option, but still. “Were you there the time with the gear stick and the-”

“Yes,” Bobbi says quickly. She wriggles backwards, and Lance tries to move enough to make space for her. He hopes the car isn’t rocking in a clichéd and horrible _Titanic_ fashion, and also that no one feels the need to go over the car park security footage, well, ever. He’s not exactly embarrassed, because having sex with an attractive woman in a situation that’s only mildly inappropriate is never something to be embarrassed about, but then there’s the _complications_.

God, but he wishes he hadn’t given up smoking. He could really do with an awkward post-coital fag right now.

“Well, well done us for not getting injured this time, then,” Lance says, because the air in the car is warm and thick and dirty and if he doesn’t fill it with noise then he doesn’t know what it’ll do to them. 

“Go ask Coulson for a gold star,” Bobbi says dryly, getting her knickers and jeans back on in one smooth hip slide that Lance has never managed to master, even after years of watching it take place. No awkward scrabbling for _her_.

“Pretty sure he likes you better,” Lance says, sitting up to reach for the waistband of his jeans, successfully whacking his head on the roof in a way that Bobbi didn’t when she was sleekly riding him five minutes ago.

“That’s nothing new,” Bobbi murmurs, and he can feel the tightness in her voice like the way her skin shifts over her shoulder blades, taut. 

Lance looks at the back of her head for a long moment, and asks: “was this just to shut me up?”

Bobbi looks at him over her shoulder, the cascade of her hair and the way she snaps her bra strap back up, business-like. “ _Everything_ is to shut you up, Hunter,” she tells him, and slides out of the car, the door shutting behind her in a way that very decidedly is not a slam.

Lance has always been a talker, and none of the words have ever been the right ones.

**1.5.**

“Just so I can get this clear,” Mack says, “do you know this woman’s real name, age, nationality, hair colour, shoe size or political affiliation?”

“You’re the only one who wants to know the political affiliation of people you shag,” Lance tells him, fidgeting absently with a screwdriver, “and why the fuck would I want to know her shoe size?”

“Shoe size can tell you all kinds of things,” Mack says, offering him a smirk before he bends back over the… thing he’s disassembling. Lance has no idea what he’s doing right now; tech’s not his thing.

“If you’re about to do the men with big feet/men with big dicks thing, please don’t,” Lance says. “I still have horrible flashbacks to that time we had to share a shower in Bucharest.”

“Most men are delighted to share a shower with me,” Mack remarks mildly, and his metal thing lets out a shower of sparks.

“I can’t believe we got onto this _again_ ,” Lance groans. “I was talking to you about Bobbi.”

“And I was telling you what a generally terrible idea getting involved with her is,” Mack says. “I’m not the first person to tell you that, and this isn’t the first time I’ve said it, but it’s not like you listen.”

“We’re pretty much _Mr & Mrs Smith_,” Lance says. It doesn’t sound like wailing, really.

“Hmmmm,” Mack says, and puts his wrench down. “You are in the sense that Bobbi Morse is a spy, but you’re just a guy who shoots people for money.”

“Hey,” Lance protests, “I do all kinds of things for money.”

Mack pinches the bridge of his nose, like Lance is giving him a headache. He’s SHIELD, but he’s okay SHIELD, the kind Lance isn’t averse to hanging with. 

“Hunter,” he says, “you have very well-publicised trust issues. Bobbi Morse is the best non-Russian liar in SHIELD, and probably the world. This has _fucking disaster_ written all over it.”

Lance scowls, and pokes at Mack’s project with the screwdriver. It makes a weird fizzing noise that he doesn’t think metal is supposed to make. Mack smacks his hand away, and relieves him of the screwdriver in a way that Lance tries not to think of as phallic and symbolic, and fails.

“I don’t have well-publicised trust issues,” he mumbles at last.

“Well,” Mack says, “the important thing is that _you_ think that.” He tips his head to one side, looks at Lance in a thoughtful way that makes his shoulders itch and makes his hand twitch toward the fag packet in his jeans. “I’m just telling you, man, this could go Sid and Nancy.”

“Hey,” Lance says, vaguely hurt, “I would _never_ kill my girlfriend in a bathroom!”

Mack shrugs one shoulder. “I didn’t say _you_ were Sid in that scenario.”

**2.0.**

It’s not terrible, in the sense that it was already terrible and therefore fucking hasn’t made things better or worse.

Bobbi is fine, probably, in that Lance can tell when she’s not fine about everything except him – at least until it’s too late to do anything about it – and she’s good at this, she can be professional about this. Lance wasn’t even all that professional even before he _stopped_ being a professional, now only good for lurching from to job to job, cash to cash.

Something like that, anyway, but they’ve had that argument before.

“You guys are great,” Skye says, lap full of StarkPad and on her eighth cup of coffee tonight, “I think May’s going to twist your head off.”

“Why mine?” Lance asks, not looking away from the screen where he’s totally beating Mack at whatever shooting game Koenig bought them for the Xbox this month, in spite of Fitz’s best efforts to be sneakily distracting. Later, Lance might decide to find this all kind of sweet, but he’ll never say it aloud. He’ll probably say something obnoxious and loud about shagging and car parks and everyone will be offended; it wouldn’t be the first time.

“Please,” Skye says, kicks at his shin, and yeah. It always comes back to Bobbi, who is necessary and important and trustworthy enough that she can get Lance into the world’s current most paranoid organisation, despite the fact his resume is made of misdemeanours, bad life choices, and blank spaces. Lance is here because Bobbi told Coulson he could be here. Lance is here because Bobbi said he didn’t have to leave.

Lance is here because he’s trying to be a good guy, for himself or for Izzy or to wind up May or to try and prove a point to a wife who took everything in the divorce, including stuff Lance didn’t know he had until it was gone. Yeah, he’s bitter, but look at him: trailing his angry stories around while he tries not to die, and Bobbi’s breasts have only got better with absence while she saves the world with her little finger and that smirk he’s never loved, never.

Bobbi’s always been a spy, made up of the lines she’s willing to cross, the lives she’s saved, the lives she’s cost. Lance has only ever really amounted to whatever money his last job got him. Is it any wonder, these days, that he opens his mouth and Bobbi just pours right out? She was always the best parts of him, and now she brings out the worst in him. Hey, that’s not half bad; maybe he’ll tell that to his therapist next time.

“What would you do without us,” Lance muses aloud, flat. “We’re teaching you all a very valuable lesson.”

“‘Always keep an obnoxious comeback in your pocket’?” Skye suggests. “Because I kind of knew that one already.”

“‘Don’t shit where you eat’,” Mack says, calm, and out of the corner of his eye Lance sees Fitz curl back, quick and too vulnerable, and he concentrates on the screen to see his life is over, unexpected, dead.

It’s not the first time for that one, either.

**2.5.**

Lance had nothing to do with the interrogation, just the extraction, and now it’s five in the morning in a European country of some description and he’s nursing cheap coffee and the icepack Isabelle handed him on a laugh. 

Bobbi Morse, on the other hand, is wide awake, eyes bright beneath perfect mascara, hair frothing around her shoulders. She had blood beneath her fingernails when Lance crashed through the ceiling and got her out, but now she’s sipping her own coffee like it’s actually worth drinking and watching him like nothing happened tonight.

“Go on, then,” he says. Bobbi arches a sleek eyebrow. “You got what you wanted out of that bloke with his three sentences and, okay, that pair of pliers. You’ve had… well, three conversations with me.”

“One of those was about sandwiches,” Bobbi reminds him, “and one of them was mostly you yelling ‘fuck’ while we dangled out of that helicopter.”

“Half of what that guy said was ‘fuck, fuck, give me back my teeth’,” Lance shrugs. He takes another mouthful of coffee, and flinches.

“Okay.” Bobbi puts her mug down, and shakes her hair back. “You were born in London, probably a little premature, and orphaned at a pretty young age.”

She keeps talking while Lance gives up on his coffee and crushes the icepack against his aching jaw; Izzy will take the piss out of him something chronic later, when they’re home free and paid and everyone’s had some sleep.

“You do realise,” he says at last, “that the backstory you’ve just given me is actually _Oliver Twist_ , right down to the dead prostitutes. Minus the anti-Semitism, though, so, brownie points for you.” 

“You were buying it,” Bobbi tells him, breaking into a smirk.

“Shouldn’t have pushed it and included the singing,” Lance says. A thought occurs to him. “How much did Izzy bet you that I’d let you get away with it?”

Bobbi raises and drops her shoulder. “She said you’d ask. She wanted me to try and sell you on Superman’s origin story.”

“You could just tell me what you’ve actually figured out about me,” Lance tells her. The painkillers were shitty to begin with and now they’re wearing off he’s getting tetchy at the edges. It’s the sort of point where what drunken Isabelle occasionally calls his _raw charm_ skids, and just becomes plain _raw_.

“I could,” Bobbi agrees, “but you wouldn’t like it. No one does. It’s why most people are smart enough not to ask in the first place.”

Lance yawns, and his jaw cracks, and it’s bloody painful. “I’m pretty sure there’s an insult somewhere in there,” he says, thick.

“There’s more than one,” Bobbi replies, bats her eyelashes. She’s a Choose Your Own Adventure story, chin propped on one graceful hand. Lance looks back at her, because there’s not much else to do. “Alright,” she says finally. “You grew up pretty happy, reasonably affluent, and then one night there was this dark alley-”

“Batman,” Lance interrupts, and: “my parents are alive and well, you know, and I get on with them great.”

“Well.” Bobbi’s head tips. “You don’t talk to your dad much after the divorce, and your mom thinks you’re a banker in Chicago; you did call her last week, but you lied to her for pretty much the whole thing.”

Lance’s mouth opens, and closes again. Bobbi’s smile waxes sad.

“Told you so,” she says.

**3.0.**

“Nope,” Mack says.

Lance puts the six-pack down next to the contraption that looks least likely to explode, and pouts: “I didn’t even open my mouth.”

“I don’t want to know when, or where, or how,” Mack tells him.

“I literally haven’t said anything,” Lance says.

“You don’t need to,” Mack says, and glares, and hey, well, that’s true. Mack’s expertise is machines, but he can read the people he knows, and Lance has always been an open book; nobody’s ever really recruited him for espionage before.

“Izzy would have listened to me,” Lance replies.

“Izzy would’ve laughed in your face.”

The bite of new loss is still sharp, still worse than anticipated every single time. Mack’s hand settles on his shoulder, his wrist, and what Lance would actually kind of like is a hug, a proper one, but he hasn’t had one of those that actually meant anything in years. This is the problem with being prickly, with surrounding yourself with prickly people: nobody’s first in line with the physical affection.

“I brought you beer,” Lance says, a dare and a peace offering in the same breath.

“I have never bothered you with the details of my sex life,” Mack points out.

“About that.” Lance liberates a bottle from the package, smacks it on the edge of the desk to make the cap leap off against his palm. “Your usual type is, you know-”

“Don’t do it, man,” Mack says, light but firm. He’s got muscles the size of Lance’s head, but for a man so invested in his own preservation, Lance really doesn’t know when to stop.

“-not twitchy and scientific and incapable of stringing a sentence together,” Lance says anyway.

Mack slowly and deliberately takes two bottles of beer. “Out,” he orders.

Well, damn. Lance didn’t know he’d reached that point already. He picks his battles, worse and worse these days, admittedly, but he’s always known when to call it quits. Insert bitchy aside about the ex-wife here, of course. He takes what’s left of his beer, and he goes.

Lance knows a lot of people, and likes hardly any of them, and even fewer of those people like him, and when it was just him and Izzy and Idaho there was someone to needle and someone to drink beer with and sometimes a punch got thrown and most of the time they trundled along okay. Now, most of the people Lance called friends are dead, and it’s him and the beer and another bundle of people who like Bobbi more than him because there’s more to like.

Fitz, in his lab, his bent over a screen, frowning and biting his lip. Lance pauses and thinks about pushing and in the end just puts another beer bottle next to him.

“That’s not-” Fitz’s mouth pulls, twists, the way it does when he knows the word but he doesn’t. “Not going to make my bad hand any better,” he says.

“Might make it more fun, though,” Lance suggests, smacks him on the shoulder, and leaves him to it.

This is how it always ends up: him and his booze and his endless lists of bad ideas.

Bobbi finds him in the common area; her hair is damp from the shower and she’s got a paperback in one hand, and for a long moment it’s like the shred of domesticity they managed to maintain never went anywhere after all.

For a split second, Lance’s mouth catches on a rebuke that doesn’t mean anything anymore, a demand for truth he no longer wants or deserves. Bobbi’s mouth presses together, and he knows she feels it too.

“I didn’t know anyone was in here,” she says quickly, as he says: “hey, you can have this space.”

“I can do this in my bunk,” he presses through, indicates his lonely drinking habit with a vague hand.

Bobbi hesitates, and then lets him have this round. She dips her head. “Thanks,” she says, careful.

He leaves the two extra bottles on the table, for Bobbi and her battered _Lando Calrissian Adventures_ omnibus. 

“You don’t want to take these to…” Bobbi trails off, and Lance dredges up a smile.

“Should’ve made a run for it with two million and Iz buried,” he says instead.

Bobbi tilts her head. “Why didn’t you?”

He shrugs. “You, probably.”

**3.5.**

The first time is in an expensive hotel that nobody will pay for in the morning, moonlight and clothes on the floor and every last cliché right down to the fact that this is completely unplanned, and maybe three hours ago Bobbi told Lance she wasn’t interested, and Lance snapped back that he wouldn’t fuck her if she was the last living orifice alive. Crude, maybe, but the SAS does all kinds of things to you and this is maybe one of the more palatable ones.

Bobbie’s body is a pure mess of athleticism and scars, and maybe later on he’ll learn that she has two sets of stories for her marks, the _rollerblades when I was eight_ story, the _don’t bring a gun to a knife fight_ one that sounds cooler in a SHIELD debrief, or sprawled in bed with a new lover you acquired mostly through yelling and other people’s bruises. He’s got his own matching ones, of course; falling off fences as a child, _you were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off_ at the other end of the spectrum. Mystery is overrated when you’ve fought this hard to look this cool; something like that, anyway.

“They all said you were going to kill me,” he mumbles, lust-drunk and tired, his every breath warm from where it peels against Bobbi’s skin on the way to his lungs, the words rasping through sore lips and a jaw clicking from the possible hours he spent between Bobbi’s thighs. He considered suffocation then, too, or that she was just going to break his neck with gymnastic grace, and hey, at that point, he would probably have let her.

The lamp on the bedside table crashes to the floor. It sounds pricey.

“Night’s not over yet,” Bobbi reminds him.

Lance laughs, or chokes on the air in the space between her breasts, one of the two, anyway, and this is exactly the way he imagined it would be, in that it’s too much and it’s insane and he thinks one of his shoulders might be bleeding and Izzy will smirk at him tomorrow and probably demand some kind of cash for a bet he’s managed to side-step. Bobbi Morse: fucks like she kills, and maybe combines the two to save time when she’s on SHIELD’s clock. 

Bobbi has all the leverage, shifting in his lap with powerful jerks of her hips that tell him that he’s a welcome participant but Bobbi would be doing just fine without him, and his heels skid in the sheets when he tries to thrust up because he’ll shoot the fuck out of you but Bobbi will be the one in the corner with all of the angles, and she’s the one with all the angles now, while he tries not to brain himself on the headboard and fumbles a hand between her legs, trying not to sprain a wrist while getting her off. Isabelle swore blind that that would happen, and now he has to try and make sure that it doesn’t.

He still comes first, with the vague suspicion Bobbi engineered that so that she can hold it over him later, and he sinks his teeth into her shoulder while she quiver-shakes against him and shifts her hips faster, timing her own orgasm with the comedown from his. Lance is never going to admit that anyone is better at sex than he is, because he’s put in a diligent amount of practice, but still: _damn_.

It’s been days since they slept and Lance isn’t sure about the last time he ate anything either; Bobbi is warm and slick under his hands and their breathing is harshly out of sync, all shaking muscles and teeth and nails and skin. Lance keeps his eyes shut and doesn’t move from where he’s got his forehead pressed to Bobbi’s breastbone, fucking exhausted and enjoying the buzz-blurring silence of the aftermath.

“…are you crying?” Bobbi asks carefully, a while later, when he’s going soft inside her and somebody should probably move before they’re uncomfortably welded together or Lance just passes out in an embarrassing fashion.

“I am absolutely not crying,” Lance replies, thickly. 

This happens, sometimes; it’s easier to explain away if everyone’s drunk, and it’s a relief when Bobbi climbs off him, leaving him to shuck the condom in the direction of the broken lamp and slide sideways into the sheets. It’s been a very, very long week, okay. 

“Can you at least wait until Iz isn’t in my vicinity before you tell her I’m an emotionally unstable shag?” he says, bleakly, and it’s possible that he’s just sweating out of his eyes a bit or it’s raining on his face or in this hotel room or Bobbi’s just broken him with those thighs, all of those are not unreasonable assumptions. He can hear Bobbi padding around the room, presumably finding her clothes again, but now he’s lying down he never wants to move again and he doesn’t bother looking.

“I was pretty much going to let her joke herself out and then get us coffee,” Bobbi says, the bed dipping behind him as she scrambles on to the mattress. 

“What are-” Lance begins.

“You’ve pretty much got ‘little spoon’ written all over you,” Bobbi tells him, leaning to nip his earlobe before she throws a leg over his hip and curls up behind him. “Now shut up, we’ve got like four hours before we have to escape out the window with the hotel bathrobe.”

“Bathrobe wasn’t in the brief,” Lance says, and thinks about it, and lets himself relax into her a little.

“I’m flexible,” Bobbi replies, and yeah, well, he _knows_.

**4.0.**

“You’re being a brat,” Bobbi says.

Lance considers this, shifts his weight. They could have discussed this like adults, but they’re not adults when it comes to each other, and it was easier to antagonise until Bobbi either had to seek him out or punch him. His methods haven’t really changed since their marriage, actually; maybe he should look at that sometime, but he feels his personal growth quota has been filled up enough for this year.

“I was always a brat,” he says, “I just managed to convince you I wasn’t for about five minutes.”

Bobbi considers him, mouth twisting to the side. “It felt like longer.”

“Things always do, with hindsight.” Lance isn’t drunk, but he could be, if he wanted to be. He’s good at maudlin when there’s booze involved; he used to be better at shaking it off, but hey, he spends his time in a badly-lit basement these days, and when he’s not required to have steady hands there are worse ways to spend the time than slightly blurred.

Bobbi lets her eyes skim over him, and she raises a significant eyebrow.

“We could’ve been having a moment, there,” Lance tells her, “and you ruin it with a dick joke.”

“I thought you said there was never a wrong time for dick jokes,” Bobbi replies.

“Well,” Lance muses, “that wasn’t completely wrong of me, anyway.”

They list into silence; perhaps the first silence they’ve had in years. It’s been easier to be loudly furious at each other than let things sit; there’s time to think, when it’s just them and the way they’ve always been drawn to each other. Thinking’s never led them anywhere good.

“You should talk to someone about Isabelle,” Bobbi says, finally, quiet.

“I’ve lost people before,” Lance snips.

Bobbi just stares at him until his hackles lower a little. “You cut off her hand in a car with that knife you always carried and now you never do,” she says. “She died in front of you and you couldn’t save her and you couldn’t save Idaho and I don’t mind being your verbal punching bag because you haven’t landed one good hit yet, but, Hunter, you should speak to someone.”

“Do you mean you want me to talk to you?” Lance asks, quick on the defensive. There was a time when he wasn’t on the defensive with her, and every time he remembers that, the things she has on him, it makes him want to thicken his armour just so that nobody can have those things again. “Take my tales of crazy and woe to Coulson and take me out that way? Did it turn out vouching for me was as shitty an idea as it probably seemed in the first place?”

Bobbi’s face doesn’t change. “You remember the shenanigans from a couple of weeks ago, when Coulson carved up most of his office and then tried to take a civilian hostage?”

“Rings a faint bell,” Lance replies. Bobbi never said _shenanigans_ before he came along; it’s good to know he left a legacy of some kind.

“I’m not going to start throwing around accusations of crazy in here,” Bobbi tells him. “It’s that whole thing about glass houses and stones.”

“Well, that’s good to know.” Lance sighs, tips his head back. Bobbi energises him, but she tires him out too. This much resentment, this much guilt; it’s exhausting. 

“I know I’m not the right person,” Bobbi says, “but you do _have_ a therapist, I know you do; you could talk to them about something other than your bitch queen ex-wife.”

“I won’t make that mistake again,” Lance tells her, mouth lilting into something that probably looks gruesome but which feels almost like a smile. “I know you prefer ‘bitch empress’ these days.”

Bobbi tips her head. “That I do.”

It’s almost nice, this; almost civilised. Hunter’s skin feels too tight, itchy, and it’s not just scotch, not just the way Bobbi’s curls slide down her shoulder. 

“I mean it,” Bobbi says. “If you want to talk about Isabelle, you can talk to me. Don’t talk to me about anything else, but… if you need to.”

There’s a moment when it looks like Bobbi thinks she’s going to hug him, and Lance thinks he’s going to let her; at the last second she just smiles wanly and walks away, and his fingers twitch. He doesn’t say anything, and it’s worse than if he’d shouted after her.

**4.5.**

“You want to give me a hand here?” Bobbi asks.

“But you’re having so much fun beating everyone up on your own,” Lance replies, takes another drag of his cigarette. He ashes onto the floor, and the semi-conscious guy lying under his boot makes a disapproving noise. “I headbutted you in the face, mate,” Lance tells him, “stop frowning like you care about secondhand smoke.”

“Hunter!” Bobbi insists, and he looks up to see she’s still doing absolutely fine; staves and hair flying, all loose-limbed grace and brutal violence. God, but he adores her like this. It’s sexy and it’s terrifying, a combination he tries to pretend not to be attracted to, while people continue to stare straight through his terrible feigning. 

“I’m really not sure why you need me here anyway,” he says, but obediently catches one of her staves out of the air and swings it into the nearest soldier’s face. It crunches satisfyingly; not quite as elegant as Bobbi’s casual concussions, but it does the job. 

“Pretty sure it wasn’t so that you could watch me do all the work for you,” Bobbi replies, kicking out a man’s legs from beneath him and bringing her boot down on his sternum. 

“We did get different briefings,” Lance muses, briefly contemplating putting his fag out on someone’s face before deciding to just drop it to the floor, bending with the movement to toss an assailant over his back and onto the ground with their own momentum. Bobbi’s in her sleek SHIELD uniform, and he’s in dirty jeans and a t-shirt he’s been wearing for two and half days, a lovebite hidden badly by the stubble on his jaw. He might look super cool, gunslinger for hire, but he probably looks homeless with a side of trashy. 

“Mine involved making sure you behaved yourself,” Bobbi tells him, spinning and bringing someone else down with a kick.

She’s good at that; just the thought is enough to spark along Lance’s spine, though he covers it by twisting to elbow someone in the throat, quick ugly skills that he didn’t pick up in the army. They taught him the good stuff for the SAS, the swift coordinated hand-to-hand combat that protects all your important parts and keeps you winning: these days Lance tends toward the scrappy shitty punch-up moves garnered from pub fights, all teeth and bollock-kicking.

Bobbi twirls and he throws the stave back as she reaches her hand out for it, wordless and perfectly coordinated. It could unnerve him if he wanted it to. He and Iz can read each other’s minds by now, of course, colleagues who read each other’s faces and know when to kick someone under the table so they’ll keep their mouth shut, but they’re a _team_ , they live together in vans and their lives depend on synchronisation. Bobbi is something different, making her way beneath his skin in a slick infiltration as any she performs for SHIELD. It wasn’t quite too late, when Lance finally noticed, but he’s made no effort to make it stop, and it’s not just because he’s a lazy sod: he _likes_ her there. He _wants_ her there.

They kick down the last couple of members of AIM’s frankly terrible security team – who’s hiring these guys? – and Bobbi puts a hand up to her ear to comm their backup and let them know they’re not needed. Lance doesn’t go in for questioning his masculinity that often, but he’s reasonably certain he wasn’t actually needed here either: Bobbi’s a one-woman wrecking crew, and he fucking loves it.

“Great,” Bobbi says into her comm, “see you soon.”

Hunter arches an eyebrow. “Everyone else get their shit done?”

Bobbi nods. “Romanov’s inside, Barton’s got the roof secured, Izzy’s got the east wing covered.”

Lance doesn’t get time to comment on any of this, because Bobbi’s kissing him, hot and sweaty and teeth pulling his lower lip, hands in his hair, thigh between his. Post-fight adrenaline is the best, seriously. Lance sucks Bobbi’s tongue, pulls her closer so he can slide a leg between hers and she can press into it, messy and frantic. There’s not enough contact or leverage here, Bobbi’s hands dragging his t-shirt up his back, nails to his skin, and she pants into his mouth. He wants her so badly it makes him shake, makes him not care about SHIELD on Bobbi’s comms or Isabelle on his, not care about the unconscious bodies littered around them in this grubby warehouse with a fuckload of explosives somewhere under their feet. Bobbi has this effect on people, half a dozen drugs and a rush of nothing else mattering anymore.

Someone clears their throat.

“Agent Morse,” Agent Hill says. 

Lance has spent all of about ten minutes around Agent Maria Hill, and she was disapproving of him for eight and a half of those, so he hasn’t had time to develop an opinion of her, other than that she’s terrifying and has a killer stare that’s actually enough to murder his semi right now.

“Right,” Bobbi says, voice steady, eyes bright; she keeps her back to Hill as she composes her grin, pulls her expression back together again. “You can wait here until the clean-up crew arrive, can’t you, Hunter?”

“Sure,” he says, affecting a shrug, like Hill’s ever going to believe he’s a professional anymore. “Have fun.”

“Always do,” Bobbi singsongs, and follows Hill back out.

Lance smiles in a way that Isabelle would never let him live down if she could actually see him, and then reaches for another cigarette.

“I’m going to marry that woman,” he tells his semi-conscious friend from earlier, who’s still on the floor, too kicked in the throat to talk. “The whole fucking thing: roses, weeping cousins, toasts, arguing about the catering and seating arrangements.”

Even with blood leaking down his face, the AIM guy manages some kind of snigger.

“Oh, fuck off,” Lance says. “You’re bleeding on a warehouse floor and I’m going home with the woman that helped put you there. I definitely win this one.”

Well; it was years before he changed his mind about that, anyway.

**5.0.**

Behind Trip’s stash of weird health foods, and Skye’s yogurts that contain magical fruit or something that means she’ll kill you if you eat them – at least according to the bright pink post-it stuck neatly to the packaging – Lance has a few beers stashed. He liberates two, and then twists around to put them on the breakroom table.

“Well?” he says.

Fitz looks thoughtfully at them, and then at Lance, like he’s trying to figure out the angle but can’t quite catch onto it. This might not be a result of whatever brain problems are churning away in there; even Lance can’t figure out his own motives these days. Well, Bobbi probably can, but they’re trying out this thing where they don’t talk to each other unless it’s absolutely necessary, and they’re not allowed to use adjectives when they do. Things seem to be quieter around here now, though Lance is pretty sure Trip and Mack have some kind of convoluted betting pool going.

“Nah,” Fitz decides in the end, mouth tweaking into a sort of smile. “Thanks, though.”

“Fair enough.” Lance does some more rummaging – no one uses the kitchen area, they live out of vending machines, so it’s a pretty safe place to keep things – and produces a cardboard box that he puts directly in front of Fitz.

Fitz reaches out his good hand and touches the cellophane briefly. “What do you want?” he asks, hesitating a little in the middle of the sentence, but managing to keep up a suspicious/annoyed tone throughout. 

“Two things,” Lance says. “The second’s pretty straightforward, but the bribery is in case you punch me in the face after the first.” Fitz frowns at him. “You’ve got one hand that you can punch people with,” Lance reminds him.

Fitz looks at the box again, and then up at Lance. “Start with the second.”

Lance nods, and says: “I want you to teach me some technical stuff so that if we end up in another situation where the Bus can kill us all, I can actually help out. I’m used to just travelling around in cars where giving it a kick or draining something in the engine usually does the trick, this fancy plane thing is new for me.”

“Me?” Fitz asks, looking startled.

“Well, let’s face it mate, I wouldn’t understand what you were saying even if you could remember what the technical words for this shit are,” Lance tells him on a shrug. “I’ll manage much better with ‘put the blue thing near the other blue thing’.” When Fitz says nothing, he adds: “also it’s team-building, whatever bonding shit makes this sound good.”

Fitz looks thoughtful, and he reaches out to pull the box of Yorkshire Tea closer to him. Lance learned about picking people’s minutiae from Bobbi, and a little brisk research taught him that although SHIELD does import Twinings tea for the Brits, Fitz’s favourite brand is Yorkshire. No one knew to sort this out when Simmons buggered off to HYDRA, and Fitz couldn’t string a helpful sentence together, let alone a _can you buy in the tea I like_. Things have been a bit fraught since Simmons got back, enough to make groceries slip through the cracks, and so the person who is bringing Fitz his favourite tea is Lance.

 _Work all the angles_ , Bobbi used to say. Lance has pretty much always preferred the strongarm approach, but he’s never been unwilling to keep other tactics in his back pocket.

“What’s the other favour?” Fitz asks.

It’s not so much a favour as some unwarranted and presumably unwelcome advice; people pretty much never want Lance’s advice on anything, and that’s fair enough, but he ran this past his inner Isabelle and while it does count as meddling, it doesn’t count as shit stirring. 

“It’s more like a suggestion,” he says, and watches Fitz’s expression go crisp and cold. He doesn’t let go of the tea, though, which is probably enough to let Lance keep on talking. “I know I don’t know anything about the whole thing with Simmons-”

“No, you don’t,” Fitz interrupts, stinging and abrupt. 

“-but I’ve got a vague idea and I know there’s the new whole thing with Mack,” he carries on, and Fitz fumbles the box between his hands and drops it. Well, okay, that tells Lance exactly where they are on _that_ scale. He reminds himself he’s doing this for Mack: it’s the kind of good deed that will make them even, even though Mack will never know that Lance did this and would kill him if he did. It’ll make Lance feel better about himself, anyway, and that’s the important part.

“What are you t-talking about?” Fitz asks, the syllables coming out slightly wrong, if steady enough. 

“I’m talking about how you might want to persevere with actually talking to Simmons before one day you look back and you’ve ended up like me and Bobbi,” Lance says, and it’s only once he’s said it that he realises he meant to phrase it entirely differently.

Fitz is looking at him like he expected him to phrase that differently too.

“Should’ve taken me up on the beer,” Lance says dryly, to cover the awkwardness filling his mouth, and picks up one of the bottles to smack the cap off. He actually meant to tell Fitz to sort out his shit with Simmons so that he can make up his mind about Mack, something like that, anyway; it made a whole lot more sense before Lance’s ex-marriage stumbled in and fucked it up. Talk about a summary of his life.

“Tuesday,” Fitz says after a long moment. “Come find me in the lab. Don’t be late.”

“You haven’t given me a time,” Lance reminds him.

“No,” Fitz agrees, and flashes him something that might be a smile or a smirk or _something_ before he walks out.

He’s taken the tea with him, though. It’s sad, that that kind of thing can feel like winning these days.

**5.5.**

Romantically, they’re an awful bloody mess, which is amazing. It’s amazing for them, anyway; Isabelle is enjoying everything much less, even though she’s agreed to be Lance’s Best Person for the wedding that seems to be actually going ahead, despite the fact it’s a terrible idea and he and Bobbi can’t agree on napkins. Why the fuck there even _have_ to be napkins, he has no idea. He’s not sure Bobbi does either, but she’s tenacious, and once they started arguing about it, he realised she wasn’t going to let it go. Bobbi doesn’t let things go; it’s great, and it also drives him absolutely _mad_.

He’s not thinking like that, though, sleepy and fucked-out in the apartment they’re tentatively calling _theirs_ even though neither of them are home that often to use it. He’s exhausted against the sheets, and Bobbi’s curled in next to him, wearing his grandmother’s earrings and the marks from her strap-on harness. There’s a stuffed R2-D2 next to the lube on the bedside table. Bobbi pisses on his childhood and doesn’t care, and it makes Lance not care, and he loves and hates it in equal amounts. He’s always been sure he wasn’t really cut out for being in love, and the discovery that actually, he really might be, is going brutally.

“Are you going to tell everyone I’m your high school sweetheart?” he asks, amused as the thought occurs to him.

Bobbi arches an eyebrow. “Are you going to tell people I’m yours?”

Lance manages to shrug one shoulder, and then regrets it. “We don’t really go in for marrying our first awkward sexual fumbles in England. We’re more about acquiring someone and then sitting around in a house getting bitter in front of the telly for the next thirty years.” He thinks about it for a moment. “Fuck, I hope that’s not us.”

Bobbi shifts, leaning over him with one of her soft naked smiles that she doesn’t get out for just anyone. “Baby,” she says quietly, and smooths his hair back where it’s getting too long at the front, “we’ll be long dead before then.”

Lance has no idea why that’s somehow made him feel better, and says as much.

Bobbi kisses him, quick and soft, and replies: “because you know I’m right.”

Lance is pretty sure he was supposed to establish that they can _both_ be right at any given point sometime early on in the relationship, but it’s probably too late now, and in any case Bobbi probably wouldn’t even know _how_ to be wrong. Maybe she lets other people get away with it, and that’s a thought that makes his face crinkle a little. Bobbi leans in, kisses the frown lines, and says: “spill.”

Bobbi Morse is a SHIELD agent, and a spy, and bloody good at undercover. And it’s fine; they’ve established that sometimes in both of their lines of work, there are going to be times when physical contact with other people will be unavoidable. They’re both altogether too good at being honeytraps to give up on it entirely, and Lance doesn’t mind Bobbi seducing someone else as long as she belongs to him at the end of the night, at the end of the mission. That’s what Bobbi’s been sent in to do on so many occasions: find the mark, get close to them, terminate them if necessary. And that thought… well, it niggles, just a bit.

“You know how a lot of people you date tend to wind up dead?” he says, and can’t stop himself laughing when it’s poured out of his mouth, half sheepish, half relieved.

“You’re not important for anyone to hire me to kill you,” Bobbi says, in a way that’s both brutal and fond, and she adds, gentler: “and anyway, I’ve never married _those_ people.”

“We’re not married yet,” Lance reminds her. “Maybe you’ll kill me over the sodding napkins.”

“Maybe I will,” Bobbi muses. “I’ve got to get you to write me into your will first, of course.”

“You’ve already got my one family heirloom,” Lance reminds her, reaching out to stroke a fingertip against the pearls of Bobbi’s earrings. “All you’re going to get in my will is a gun that’s less good than yours, and some fillings that I’m not even sure have actual gold in them.”

“This is true,” Bobbi concedes, sliding down beside him again, where she can rest her head against his shoulder and also semi-suffocate him with her hair, because that’s his girl for you. “Gee, I fucked up the golddigging thing, didn’t I.”

“Better luck next time,” Lance tells her, and her laughter ripples through her skin and straight into his.

**6.0.**

“You need to cut my hand off,” Isabelle says, face slick with sweat, eyes straining with fear and pain and too much adrenaline.

“It didn’t work,” Lance tells her, the car closing in around him like it’s being crushed in a giant fist, and his hands are slick with blood anyway. “It won’t work this time, Iz, don’t make me do it again.”

“What are you talking about,” Isabelle grits, her teeth clenched, her blackened and dead arm on the seat between them. “You need to cut it off before the infection spreads, I’ll be fine.”

“I can’t,” Lance says, and he tries to let go of the knife but he can’t, it’s like it’s welded to his hand, and the blood is peeling between his fingers and Izzy’s just looking at him with something frantic, caught, in her eyes.

He doesn’t want to remember her like this.

“I don’t want to die,” she tells him.

“But you _did_!” he shouts, his voice too much in this tiny space, growing smaller every minute. He might be crying, he can’t tell, and Isabelle is vicious when she reaches with her good hand for his, to drag the blade closer to her deadened skin.

Something crunches into the front of the car and Lance is almost relieved for a moment, that they can all die in a fireball on the road and Isabelle’s life won’t be his responsibility anymore, but the car doesn’t flip this time, just stops, the windows splintering and going dark, and when Idaho turns in the driver’s seat he’s got blood coursing down his face and one arm reaching back toward Lance.

“Cut me loose,” he begs, the seatbelt tightening against his chest, his eyes bugging, red spittle flecking his mouth.

“Not you too, man,” Lance says, voice cracking, and Isabelle’s still trying to get him to hack her arm off, again, just so he can lose her all over, and Idaho isn’t dead on impact, is bleeding out in front of him, his eyes on Lance’s face like hey, he’s the survivor, why isn’t he saving them too?

“Baby,” and that’s a voice he doesn’t want to hear, not here, not in a car closing like a coffin around them, the team he outlived and maybe shouldn’t have, “baby, don’t forget about me.”

He doesn’t want to look, refuses to look, but Bobbi’s in the passenger seat, gold curls spilling over her shoulders, eyes as bright and awful as they ever were. She’s unzipping the front of her SHIELD bodysuit, and he recognises that bra, bought it for her back in the days when he’d buy her underwear on a whim and she’d wear it for a while and then make him wear it and the whole thing was fun in a way he can barely _imagine_ now. She strokes a finger down her cleavage, where her skin is blackening under her touch, and Lance tries to flinch away but there’s nowhere to flinch to.

“I need you to cut out my heart, Hunter,” Bobbi tells him, voice dark and weirdly seductive, and Idaho is screaming and Izzy’s face just shrieks betrayal.

“Bob, no-”

“You know you can do it,” she says, “you’ve done it before.”

That’s what he wakes up on, shouting, legs kicking cushions off the couch and breath too hard in his chest. Bobbi ducks his fists, and puts her hands on his shoulders to shake him until something clears in his head and he can register that he’s fallen asleep in the Playground again, and the people who were dead are still dead, and the people who aren’t dead are still just about here.

“Fuck,” he says softly, slumping back against the sofa, letting his head tip back. It’s half dark, and he doesn’t know what time it is or even how he got here, not really. Bobbi eyes him for a moment and then sits down beside him, a distance, but not much of one. She leans over him to grab what’s tumbled between his body and the crack between the cushions, and deftly tugs out the mostly-empty glass bottle, cap miraculously still in place.

“I thought you’d sworn off tequila,” she says neutrally, and lets the bottle fall back into place.

“I thought I’d sworn off you,” Lance reminds her, and, right, not quite sober then.

Bobbi sighs, but doesn’t move away. “You want to do this _now_?”

“I never want to do this,” he replies, too honest, and scrubs a hand over his face, over stubble a little too thick to still be nonchalant and sexy. “Not ever, Bobbi.”

“I figured,” she says, and he can’t read her smile in this half-light, his blurred vision, heart still pounding sick. “You get the nightmares often?” she adds eventually, tone conversational. It’s a lie, but one he knows well, one he can live with. It was the ones he couldn’t live with that drove him mad.

He thinks about bluffing, about _what makes you think I was having a nightmare, aren’t all tequila dreams a bit of a mess, maybe you don’t know me the way you think you do_ , but Bobbi doesn’t let go of stuff, and she won’t let him slink around this one. He can read it in the tension in her jaw, in the way she’s sitting within touching distance like that’s a decent possibility, and in the last couple of years, he’s kind of missed being pinned down to things. Funny, that.

“Not often enough for anyone to worry,” he says instead, and lets himself slump further into the couch, where exhaustion and booze threaten to pull him back under again. SHIELD might not like its personnel like this, but being your own boss has left him with some nasty habits. 

Bobbi sighs, the sound soft enough that he could pretend not to hear it, if he wanted to. He can even pretend that it’s not weird she’s still awake, this late, or that she knew where to find him. Everything’s an accident, these days, a cruel twist of fate that someone might find funny, from an objective distance.

She doesn’t say anything, none of the platitudes Lance thinks he was waiting for, and it’s a relief and a quick sting, a papercut of an emotion. Instead, Bobbi kisses the corner of his mouth and he hears her walking away.

“Do you miss Isabelle?” he hears himself asking, barely aware of the words until they’re out there.

“Of course,” Bobbi says, but there’s more, and he waits until: “but I lost her long before she died.”

It takes a second for him to put that together, knackered as he is. “We said we weren’t going to make people choose sides.”

“And we didn’t,” Bobbi replies. “But Izzy chose anyway, and I let her, and really, Hunter: how often has either of us seen Mack in the last few years?”

He takes refuge in his silence; talking about these things only really makes them worse.

**6.5.**

“How many people have you pissed off anyway?” Lance asks, breathless, four a.m. and currently dangling from a wire from a balcony in Venice. 

“You were the reason we had to leave Berlin,” Bobbi replies, also dangling, but looking much more graceful while she does it, because Bobbi is incapable of looking anything other than elegant and athletic and competent, even in the early hours of the morning wearing little more than an expensive negligee and the harness for her staves. 

“ _You_ were the reason we had to leave Rio,” Lance responds, because even while in danger of getting shot or falling in a canal or both, there’s no reason not to start bickering. That’s one of the perks of marriage, everyone knows that.

“ _Mexico_ , Lance, fucking Mexico,” Bobbi snaps back, and then wraps a length of cable around her wrist so she can drag herself up a little and see if their assailants have been thrown off the scent yet. They might die, because this is the most disorganised and potentially murderous honeymoon anyone has ever had ever, but, even so, Lance appreciates all the thigh going on. So shoot him: his wife is glorious.

Actually, don’t shoot him. There’s a reason he’s hanging off this balcony, after all.

“Pretty sure we were supposed to spend your two weeks’ holiday shagging and eating room service we managed to charge to SHIELD,” Lance says. “My life is already a bloody action movie, my honeymoon doesn’t have to be!”

“If you and Izzy didn’t spend so much time tramping around pissing people off, we’d be fine,” Bobbi responds. 

“Yeah, ‘cause it was _my_ alien-weapon-parts-dealing cover that just got blown in Italy,” Lance hisses back, and then reaches for the gun he shoved into the waistband of his boxers when he hears movements above. There’s no cover, and he’s barely dressed and jet-lagged, and he would really like to at least make it through his honeymoon before he meets his presumably inevitable inglorious death.

“We’re going to have to jump,” Bobbi informs him.

Lance looks down, wishes he hadn’t, and looks back to Bobbi. “No,” he says, “come on, there’s got to be a better idea.”

Bobbi jerks her head at him. “Go on, then,” she says, “have one.”

Lance lets out a breath through his teeth, shakes his head. “Piss off, Bob,” he replies.

She grins at him, quick and gleeful, and she’s probably fucking _enjoying_ this. “Didn’t you just swear a bunch of vows about obeying?”

“Pretty sure it didn’t say anything about jumping into Venetian canals,” Lance replies.

“You’ve always been terrible at small print,” Bobbi says, winks at him, and launches herself into the air.

She falls gracefully, landing in the water with the quiet ripping sound proper divers make, and Lance glances back up toward what was their honeymoon suite, now being torn apart by angry psychopathic Italians. He could, he supposes, pretend he’s an innocent bystander Bobbi picked up for a shag, not involved at all, but then he’d have to drop the gun and ditch his new wedding ring. His thumb tucks under the band, ready to flick it toward the canal but… he can’t do it.

“Fuck,” he mumbles, curls his toes, and lets go of the wire.

**7.0.**

Lance spends a while telling people who don’t care about his plans to hit the gym, catch up on his paperwork – no, really, don’t laugh like that, Trip – get a nap, blah blah blah, and then doubles back to the little room most people seem to have missed that’s just got a sofa and a TV in it, and it barely fits those. He’s not sure what it’s supposed to be used for, but he likes a place he can hide and watch football with his feet up and nobody trying to use the word ‘soccer’ in his direction, so he hasn’t asked. He’s always known the importance of bolt holes.

The thing is, Lance has been busy over the last few months, and while he’s still busy now, SHIELD has more regularly scheduled downtime, and tiny little rooms to have it in. So he marked this time aside, and everyone thinks he’s doing something else, and he’ll have the TV all to himself.

That was the plan, anyway. He actually finds Fitz and Simmons sitting at awkward opposite ends of the sofa, like they’re trying to clamber away from each other, in a tight silence that this room just isn’t big enough for. They both have cups of tea, and they look almost ludicrously relieved to see him. That’s weird, because nobody’s ever relieved to see Lance if he’s not crashing through a ceiling, all guns blazing. 

“Oh,” he says. “Right. Well. I’ll just go away and-”

“Capaldi?” Fitz asks.

Lance considers his options, and then gives in. “Capaldi,” he confirms.

Bobbi’s the nerdy one, with the _Star Wars_ novels and the DC t-shirts that she wears ever more ironically and the Whedon quotes for any given occasion. Bobbi was the one who tried to make him cosplay as Slave Leia to her Han Solo for ComicCon one year – which he didn’t go for, because Bobbi has his heart on a string, but he picked where to draw his line and it was there – and dragged him to San Diego so she could make him carry piles of merch for her and pay inhuman amounts for bottles of water to drink in the endless lines. Lance sat through her space movies and her cartoons and begrudged her none of it, but the only place their interests really bisected was, of course, inevitable.

It’s funny how his marriage collapsed the year _Doctor Who_ went to shit.

Neither Fitz nor Simmons move, so Lance gingerly sits down between them. “This isn’t awkward at all,” he says cheerfully, but Simmons offers him a Hobnob and he lets her, and for once it’s kind of nice to sit in the middle of an emotional mess he didn’t actually cause himself.

The advert break before _Doctor Who_ is just coming to a close when the door opens, and Bobbi appears, jeans and t-shirt and flask of coffee. She takes in the three of them, and her expression doesn’t flicker, but Lance knows that it wants to.

“Bobbi!” Simmons exclaims. To Lance’s left, Fitz doesn’t move, bad hand curled on his knee. 

Well; SHIELD never was particularly full of emotionally adjusted people.

“I was going to-” Bobbi begins. “I mean, I’ll just leave you to-”

Lance sighs, because, what the hell, they might as well make this all worse, trying to make it better hasn’t exactly paid off. Mack would roll his eyes at him, but Mack isn’t here, trying to watch BBC America in rapidly eroding privacy.

“Capaldi?” he says.

Bobbi smiles. “Capaldi,” she confirms, and steps inside.

Lance has watched the last few series with Izzy not caring and Idaho openly mocking him as he hunched over his laptop, and he’s not sure what to do with company, with Fitz and Simmons both clearly invested despite their silence, with Bobbi back again like they didn’t agree to never watch this show together, ever.

There isn’t enough room on the sofa for her, and Lance could be a gentleman, but it’s not his deeply-buried chivalry that Bobbi drags out of him. Instead, Bobbi comes to sit fluidly on the floor in front of the sofa, leaning back against Lance’s knees like this is normal, like they’ve done this recently, had this kind of contact as par for the course instead of in a series of awkward accidents after being forced into each other’s vicinity. Her back fits easily against his legs, a few stray curls caught on the knees of his jeans, and they’ve always fitted together perfectly, keys for each other’s locks, whatever you want to call it. 

Lance’s fingers twitch, and he looks at the TV just in time for the first episode of the season eight repeats to start. 

Later on, he might consider this all as progress.

**7.5.**

“We’re the back-up for a face-to-face meeting that doesn’t start ‘til midnight,” Lance says, shrugging into his leather jacket and checking his guns are securely in his choice of holsters. “Don’t wait up.”

His wife, a sprawling mess of sheets and limbs and hair, doesn’t even crack an eye open. “Never do,” she responds, and slides straight back into her post-coital nap. Spies, nought to awake in a split second, but they can sleep whenever they want to. Lance still hasn’t figured out if this is a thing Bobbi got taught at espionage school or if she’s just gifted, but Bobbi keeps things like that close to her chest, and he can’t pry it loose.

They’re still a couple of miles away, Idaho humming along to Katy Perry on the radio, when they’re rear-ended. Izzy has a gun in her hand immediately, twisting in her seat to look behind them.

“ _Fuck_ ,” she snarls, and ducks into her seat as a bullet hits the back window and shatters it all over them.

Lance pulls his own gun, while Idaho frantically twists the steering wheel, trying to get them some cover before the tyres are shot out. 

“What the _fuck_?” he demands, Katy Perry a surreal accompaniment to screaming tyres on the wet asphalt, Izzy with her phone pressed to her ear shouting in what Lance thinks might be Russian. _Bobbi would know_ , he thinks through the haze of adrenaline, the moment before everything becomes sharp and manageable. Then he clicks the safety off his gun, leaning up to fire a few quick shots through where the window used to be; hears breaking glass and someone swearing.

“They’re onto the whole thing,” Isabelle tells him, eyes bright in the mostly-dark, “taking out the back-up before we even get there.”

“Why not just offer us more money not to be there?” Lance asks. “We’re mercenaries, for God’s sake.”

Idaho brakes sharply as the tyres explode beneath them, and grabs a gun of his own out of the glove compartment.

“Maybe they think we’re better than that,” Idaho suggests, “I mean, Huntley’s got a reputation.”

“Wash your mouth out,” Izzy says on a grin, firing a few shots out of the broken window too. At least two must hit their marks, because Lance hears the sharp unmistakable crumpling of bodies. They’re going to have to get out of the car before they become sitting ducks in a breakable metal coffin full of flammable fossil fuels, and Lance reaches for the door handle, eyes on the brick wall that should provide him with cover, if he can make it.

“I’m not better than that,” he says, “I’ve got no fucking honour at all,” and opens the door.

That’s the only thing he registers for the next sixteen hours, which include an ambulance journey, two shocks with a defibrillator, and some emergency surgery.

When he’s next conscious, he’s in a crisp white hospital bed with a throat full of drying cement and a pounding pain in his temple, crueller than the cruellest morning after. He blinks a few times, tries to turn his head and fails, and eventually locates Bobbi, curled up asleep in a chair beside his bed. She doesn’t look comfortable, head pillowed on a jumper that looks like that one they bought Mack last Christmas, wearing a faded Batman t-shirt, flip-flops, and jeans that are too short for her. 

Lance coughs, and it takes a couple of goes to rasp out an approximation of: “Bob, why are you wearing my jeans?”

Bobbi wakes immediately, is on her feet with her usual fluid grace, except that everything’s a little bit off-kilter, jerkier than normal. Her hair is tangled, and there’s blood smudged on one cheek, a washed-out peaky cast to her features.

“When you get out here I’m going to kill you,” she says, and all but flings herself onto him.

It’s not easy, to lift one hand and manage to drop it into Bobbi’s hair, an approximation of soothing that he can’t make any better because most of him doesn’t want to move, and there’s a blissful swimmy feeling that tells him there’s morphine involved. Which is great; morphine is great. He loves morphine. He loves Bobbi, too, who smells reassuringly warm and familiar in this place where everything smells like anaesthetic and plastic.

Lance continues badly petting her hair, fingers stiff, the nails caked in blood. 

“What’s going on?” he asks at last.

Bobbi pushes herself up enough to look at him with wild, angry eyes; maybe the least in control he’s ever seen her. “Six bullets, Lance,” she practically snarls. “They pulled _six bullets_ out of you. Izzy called me from the ambulance because there was a point where they were pretty sure you weren’t going to make it.”

He turns this over a few times in his head, decides he’s too drugged and tired to process those thoughts right now, and tries to smile. “I’m here, Bob. I’m always going to be here.”

Bobbi sniffs a little – she’s not crying, but Lance has the weird suspicion that at one point she _was_ , and he doesn’t know what to do with that either – and tries on a smile. “To be honest, it’s a wonder you’re not dead already,” she says, but she doesn’t move, and he doesn’t try to make her.

A month later, when he’s off on a routine job that Izzy promises won’t get anyone hurt, Lance kisses Bobbi’s cheek. “See you later, Bob.”

He’s almost at the front door before she blurts: “don’t die out there, okay?”

He turns back, salutes. “Okay.”

**8.0.**

These days, Lance tries not to seek Bobbi out; they’ve never known how to stay away from each other in a way that would stick, desperate to tumble back toward each other even if it’s just to drive another knife between one another’s bared shoulder blades. One of those eternal climbs where you think you’ve nearly reached the top, only to fall again, dragged back down by the weight of inevitability. Something like that, anyway. He thought she’d adopted the same policy, for self-preservation if nothing else, but he walks into the kitchen area and there’s Bobbi, two steaming cups of tea, her expression patient.

“Calling your mom?” she says, phrasing it like a question when it’s clear she already knows the answer. It makes Lance’s teeth grit. “You get this _look_ ,” she adds.

Lance considers his options, and then says: “she asked after you.”

That makes Bobbi’s eyebrows raise, at least. “You told her we’re working together again?”

He shakes his head, lilts a half smile. “She always asks.”

“What do you tell her?” Bobbi asks.

Lance lifts a shoulder. “I tell her you’re an alcoholic who’s failing at real estate.”

He watches Bobbi’s lips curl, seeing through his lie even before he put it together, and she ducks her head in that way that makes her look almost vulnerable. It’s three-quarters act, of course, but he still falls for it every time, can’t help himself. He picks up the spare tea, sips it.

“Maybe I don’t take sugar any more,” he says, doesn’t blink, doesn’t drop Bobbi’s gaze. 

Bobbi’s response is a wordless eyebrow arch, and he doesn’t look away for a few more seconds until he cracks and loses, as ever. 

“You know,” Bobbi begins, and he already knows this is what she actually wanted to talk to him about, uncomfortable small talk just an unfortunate side-effect, “I thought when I got here you’d told the others all about me.”

“I have no idea where they got the hellbeast thing from,” he says, automatic, and Bobbi rolls her eyes.

“You didn’t tell them anything about me,” she says. “You talk about me the way other people talk about their ex-wives. Clichéd dialogue about bitches and life-ruining.”

“You are a bitch who ruined my life,” Lance suggests, but it sounds hollow, and feigning ignorance around Bobbi has never really worked for him.

“You told Skye I judged your folding skills,” Bobbi presses on.

“You did!” Lance protests, because, yeah, that was a fun argument, the half-packed suitcase crashing to the bedroom floor and their clothes looked even worse afterwards.

Bobbi ignores him. “You picked up on all the little arguments we had and you smashed in some TV show epithets and you shied away from the truth.”

Lance can’t talk about the truth. He couldn’t then and he can’t now, and it’s easier to pretend his marriage was simple and crashed and burned like so many do, straightforward and ordinary. 

“What did you want me to tell them?” he asks, and his voice has gone sharp and bitter, more serious than he intended. “That our marriage was poison and mostly built on lies and now I’ll never love anybody the way I loved you?”

Bobbi tilts her head. “‘Loved’?” she echoes.

That’s too much, too close. “Don’t push it, Bob,” he tells her.

The silence is the aural equivalent of cuticles picked to bleeding, strained taut between them. Lance isn’t going to be the one to break it; he’s broken enough things that belonged to them.

Bobbi’s the one who sighs. “Sometimes I was jealous of Isabelle, you know? I wanted you to love me like that.”

Well, that’s a new one. “Izzy and I were never- we weren’t-”

“I know.” Bobbi smiles loosely at him, quick and sad. “I always knew that. But it wasn’t complicated between you guys, and it didn’t have to be.”

Lance frowns. “So, you wanted me to love you… like a mate?”

Bobbi laughs. “You know I never wanted friendship from you,” she says and, well, that much has always been obvious. “It doesn’t matter that I know you better than anyone, now, or that I see the parts you’re trying to hide these days, the good and the bad. We can’t be friends. We’ll never be friends.”

Even now, he’s not always sure when Bobbi is lying to him; that much, though, that’s true. Civility is a herculean effort most days, and since they both started working for SHIELD they’re pretty much just waiting for their covers to be blown, for everyone to realise just how jagged and nasty things truly are between them, worse than any clichéd divorced couple they’re pretending to be. 

“No,” he agrees, “we won’t,” and lets Bobbi kiss him first.

It’s messy and frantic as things always are between them, all grasping hands and battling teeth, familiar tongues twining like they can suck the cruelty right out of each other. Bobbi might be shaking, or maybe he is, and it’d be easier to be truly furious most of the time if he wasn’t so bloody _tired_ , still so betrayed, like his emotions froze the first time Bobbi turned around he realised that she was full of secrets behind her eyes that she’d never let him own, no matter how hard he tried.

Lance pulls away before he wants to, catching the moment of Bobbi’s closed eyes and red kissed mouth, and he curls his fingers between the ones she has pressed to his cheeks so he can pull them away.

“Bob,” he says softly, “we can’t.”

They can and they do, always, but the look on Bobbi’s face is pure defeat; he hasn’t seen it in a long time. It’s ugly on her, and worse because he put it there.

“I should’ve left the first time you reminded me of old times,” he admits.

“So… that’d be about eight seconds after you realised I was back?” Bobbi replies, and her smile looks a little like it actually belongs to her now.

“Pretty much,” he says, wry smile, and he’s still holding her hands. 

“But you didn’t,” Bobbi says.

“I didn’t,” he agrees, and he doesn’t let go and she doesn’t either.

**8.5.**

“You don’t understand,” Lance tells Isabelle. He’s drunk, but not that drunk, and not as drunk as he intends to be.

“I do,” she responds, “I’m just less interested than you think I am. I told you from the beginning that Bobbi was a terrible idea, and you just went ahead and married her.” She tilts her head. “Did you know Mack and I use you as our argument against heterosexual monogamous marriage? You two are the entire ‘cons’ column.”

“Thanks, Iz,” he says. “Big help, you are.”

Isabelle shrugs. “I bought the beer,” she reminds him. 

This is true. Lance is a big fan of the beer, and of the jagermeister Isabelle is liberally adding to his every glass.

“I bet you don’t have this with Hand,” he says.

“That’s because we’re actual adults, we’re not trying to run a co-dependent marriage based on us both pretending to be better versions of ourselves, I never expect Victoria to be honest with me, and she’s not actually an undercover agent specialising in deception,” Isabelle replies, ticking the reasons off on her fingers. “We fuck, it’s great, and, unlike you two, we’ve managed to actually keep our strings unattached.”

“It’s not my fault Bobbi’s an international spy living in a fucking tapestry of lies!” Lance snaps, and then decides he hasn’t drunk enough if _tapestry of lies_ is something he’s actually saying aloud.

“She never pretended she wasn’t,” Isabelle says, playing devil’s advocate with ease and possibly too much glee, “you were the one lying when you said you were fine with it.”

“I didn’t know I was lying,” Lance replies, morose, and drinks some more. “I’m the one stuck at home while she’s out being James Sodding Bond, all martinis and adventures and other people.”

Izzy just looks at him for a long moment. “You realise you just basically called yourself a Bond Girl, don’t you?”

Lance waves a hand. “Bond Girls have it _great_ ,” he says, “they get to fuck Bond and then they die and they don’t have to worry when he’s coming home or _if_ he’s coming home or what they’re supposed to say to him when he does, they just get the good bits and bam, done.”

Isabelle is laughing into her drink by now. “This is a new level of tragically pathetic, Hunter,” she tells him. “In case you hadn’t noticed.”

Lance is aware. He knows all about this. It keeps him awake when Bobbi’s there and when she isn’t, the schisms he can see that he can’t fill with sex and banter and affection, much as he wants to. They have a flat neither of them spends much time in and even when SHIELD are willing to hire him for back-up, it’s hardly ever on missions with Bobbi; he doesn’t know how she spends her time and she won’t tell him. Half their conversations feel like interrogations on both sides: Lance being blindingly, frustratingly obvious about it, Bobbi being subtle, like she’s pulling ribbons of truth out of him that he never wanted to let go of but can’t help. Bobbi’s got everything on him, took most of it before he even noticed that was what she was doing, and Lance doesn’t know the woman he married.

They push and pull at each other, worse every time, now there’s something raw and nakedly sharp underneath it all that wasn’t there before, and Bobbi has his every number written down somewhere in that endless brain of hers, while he tries to make sense of her and finds himself locked out of more and more doors.

Isabelle’s fiddling with her phone. “I’m telling Mack that the honeymoon period’s over,” she informs Lance.

He thinks about this, chasing a bead of condensation down his glass with a fingertip. “We spent our actual honeymoon running from each other’s murdery enemies.”

“And you’re surprised you’ve ended up here?” Izzy asks, snapping open another beer bottle and sliding it toward him. “I mean, you really should have written your own vows, none of the things you swore to each other have been particularly relevant, in the end. You might as well have just said ‘let’s try and get through this without killing each other’ and leave it at that.”

Lance leans back in his chair, shuts his eyes. “This is not in any way what I wanted you to say.”

“What _do_ you want me to say?” Izzy sighs. 

“I don’t know, maybe something like ‘you’ll get through this’?” Lance suggests.

“I’m not saying you won’t,” Izzy says. “I mean, some people do manage to walk away from car crashes.”

Well; it’ll be a few more years before he learns that some people _don’t_.

**9.0.**

“You need to stop using the word ‘never’,” Mack says, “because you have no idea what it means.”

He looks tired, because they all look tired, stretched thin across a world determined to both need them and erase them from existence, and hey, Lance already knew how that felt. 

“Hey,” Lance protests mildly.

“Most people,” Mack continues, ignoring him, “when they say ‘never’, mean ‘something that will not ever happen, ever’. When you say it, you just mean ‘until’.”

They’re in the lab, surrounded by bits of metal and wires. Even with a couple of sessions of Fitz’s tutoring – which could be going well, and could equally be going terribly; Fitz spends most of the time smacking Lance’s hands away from things and periodically half-asking questions about Mack before pretending that he’s forgotten what words are and that he never intended to begin the sentence in the first place, fucked-up brain, don’t you know – Lance has no idea what any of these things do. It’s okay; he’s much better at breaking them, that’s what they’re paying him for.

“There is no ‘never’ with Bobbi, you know that,” Lance sighs, and prods the nearest wire with a fingertip. It doesn’t electrocute him, but Mack pointedly moves it away anyway.

“Yeah, she’s worse at letting things go than you are,” he agrees, reaching absently for his coffee.

“I let go of everything,” Lance reminds him, “except maybe cash. Nothing gets me, water off a duck’s back, etc.”

“Yeah,” Mack says, “you’re doing a great job letting go of your ex-wife. A plus work there, Hunter.”

“None of this is my fault,” Lance tells him, and maybe it’s even true, who knows anymore. “It’s her who keeps-”

Mack holds up a hand. “I’m not getting involved in your shit,” he says. “I’m not your new Isabelle.” The words are abrupt, pure Mack, but his tone is soft enough that they almost sting more. “Do you remember what I did during your divorce?”

Lance squints, has a sift through a set of largely incomplete memories. “I’m not sure, but I think it involved tequila.”

“It did,” Mack agrees, but he seems to be waiting for something else.

“You chose Bobbi?” Lance suggests.

“You guys told us all not to pick sides,” Mack reminds him. 

“Yeah, and that definitely happened and we all got on great and met up the next Thanksgiving as awesome sitcom friends,” Lance says, dry. 

Mack shrugs. “Bobbi’s more fun than you are.”

“I’m fun!” Lance tells him, stung.

“Dragging you out of shitty bars when you got people to punch you in the face was definitely the highlight of that year,” Mack says, deadpan, and, okay, Lance was kind of a mess. He presumes Bobbi was too, in her own way, but his ways always involve more noise and haranguing other people and painfully visible bruises.

“Obviously, you were with Let’s Live On Chia Seeds And Ice Cubes bloke,” Lance replies, screwing up his nose. “His hangover cures really were something, like puking up gravel afterwards.”

“This is why my couch will never be available to you again,” Mack says, and then he sees something over Lance’s shoulder and says: “okay, out, take your Bobbi nonsense somewhere else.”

Lance looks behind him and, ah, it’s Fitz.

“I don’t mind playing third wheel,” he says, “it looks like he brought snacks.”

“You’ve done enough interfering for the moment,” Mack replies, pushing Lance until he loses his comfy perch on the edge of the lab bench. 

“You found out about that?” Lance grimaces. “I was trying to help, for the record.”

“I know,” Mack says, “and I didn’t say you didn’t. I’m just saying that you need to go far away now.”

“I think you should get me a muffin basket,” Lance informs him, and he steps away from Mack’s glare. “I’m going! Jeez.”

He looks back when he gets to the door, but the way Fitz smiles at Mack, quick and shy and weirdly genuine in a way he isn’t with other people, well, that’s just too close for comfort, caught on the shred of a memory he won’t indulge. He _won’t_.

**9.5.**

“Lance?” Bobbi says. She’s got a split lip that’s bleeding and carpet burn raising red on her cheek, half-hidden by the tangle of her hair.

“Mmmm?” Lance manages, from amongst what remains of the coffee table.

He thinks they were fucking at one point, but they’re not fucking now. They’re not doing much of anything now, half-dressed, bloody and bruised and shaking with the excess fury that burns off when the adrenaline fades, leaving them too tired even for a make-up shag.

This is marriage, though, isn’t it: Lance remembers his parents doing similar things to each other, only they just hit each other with words, not pieces of Ikea bookcases.

It’s been a long few months of communication breaking down, screaming at each other more often than they speak, and Lance is beginning to forget what it felt like to have an emotion about his wife that wasn’t plain _anger_. In their halcyon days, the ones when he couldn’t believe that Bobbi Morse was willing to spend any time around him at all, they swore to each other that this wouldn’t be them; that they were above such pedestrian mainstream problems as a collapsing marriage. Now, the cracks aren’t so much cracks as chasms, and there’s no way back. That’s the horrible slow-trickling thought that neither of them will voice aloud: it’s never going to get better, is it.

Lance shifts, pulling one of the table legs out from beneath a back already throbbing with bruises, tries to work out if he’s having a migraine from the argument or if he just has concussion of some kind, and there’s got to be some scotch left in the flat they haven’t already drunk or flung at each other. The first aid kit probably needs refilling at some point too; Bobbi at least has SHIELD medical to turn to, Lance has to sort himself out while Isabelle rolls her eyes and Idaho grimaces in that way of friends who want to help but who also definitely do not want to be involved in any way, shape, or form.

Isabelle informed him that she has a futon that’s always available last week, in between concussing various sub-par hired security people; Lance pretended not to hear, but he and Bobbi both have their bags half-packed, on a hair trigger to flee the flat and pretend that maybe they’ll come back some time.

They weren’t supposed to be like _other people_. They were supposed to be golden, smart and stylish and quick-witted enough to avoid this. They weren’t supposed to sink into awkward silences and shattered crockery and bitter silences as they fight over who’s going to sleep on the couch tonight.

Lance already has a list of things he used to be that’s becoming uncomfortably long; he doesn’t really want to add _husband_ to the bottom of it.

Bobbi offers Lance her hand and he accepts it, pressing a sleeve cuff to his nosebleed, staggering as he gets himself upright. This isn’t the worst of their fights, but it’s been pretty nasty anyway, and Bobbi’s left eye is ringing black already. The knee of his jeans is inelegantly torn, the skin underneath scraped, and he fucking _liked_ these jeans.

They both look at the wreckage of the coffee table.

“Didn’t Mack get us this for Christmas that time?” Lance asks.

Bobbi nods. “It was an antique,” she replies.

Lance grimaces. “Well, he should’ve known better,” he says at last. “I mean, whatever we touch turns to shit these days, right, Bob?”

Bobbi turns to actually look at him; she looks stricken, like he’s finally hit something hard enough in that stone façade for it to hurt. It was a nice coffee table; he suspects he’ll spend tomorrow with Isabelle trying to pick splinters of it out of his back. It’s all fun and games until your wife kicks you across the room, that’s how that saying goes, right?

“Lance,” is all she says, soft, and he can’t read the look in her eyes. They’re too bright, but she won’t cry; he may know nothing about her, but he knows that much.

“Bobbi,” he says, because what else is left?

She shakes her head, presses her hands to her face, and lets out something that might be a sob, might be a laugh. “I can’t do this anymore,” she says.

“What?” he asks.

Bobbi turns to him again, and he’s never seen her look like this, never wants to see her look like this again.

“This has to stop,” she says. “This has to be over. We- we have to be over.”

Lance stands and looks at her, this woman who he made his world and his wife who has shut so many doors against him, shutting this last one.

“You don’t mean that,” he says, a shake in his voice that he didn’t mean to put there, but his mouth feels numb and when did they agree that they’d ever actually pull the plug? Is this allowed to be over?

“You said it yourself,” Bobbi tells him, “we are poison right now. And I don’t- I don’t want this.”

Lance looks at her, and has no idea what to say. Part of him wants to apologise for putting that expression on Bobbi’s face, wants to pull her close and kiss away the bruises and tell her that they’re done with these arguments, with this phase of their marriage. Part of him wants to punch her and see if maybe he can break her nose this time.

“Fuck what you want,” he says.

What makes Bobbi such a good spy, so good at everything she does, is her tenaciousness. She never lets anything go, presses one point in an interrogation until her suspect splinters, sticks at something until she perfects it and adds it to her repertoire. Bobbi Morse, who’ll outlast anything, withstand whatever you throw at her, to do what she wants.

Even years later, Lance has never forgiven her for giving up on him.

**10.0.**

“Do you remember,” Bobbi says, noodles spilling from her chopsticks, “that time you rang me up and offered to carry my babies like a male seahorse?”

“I… don’t,” Lance admits. “How did I think I was going to manage that, exactly?”

“You were very drunk,” Bobbi says.

“Well, yes,” he agrees. “I was drunk for about ninety percent of the divorce proceedings.”

“I remember,” Bobbi says dryly. “There was that time you were supposed to be coming by the apartment to pick up some clean clothes, and I got home to find you’d eviscerated an Ewok toy and stuck it to the new coffee table with a knife through its head.”

“Oh yeah,” Lance says, nostalgic, as Mack interrupts: “what happened to that coffee table I got you guys?”

“We couldn’t agree who got custody, so we sold it,” Bobbi and Lance recite in unison. It’s not the first time they’ve done this; sooner or later, Mack is going to stop believing them.

“I called you about the Ewok,” Bobbi carries on, “and you slurred, I quote: ‘the Ewok is my balls’.”

Skye chokes on her pad thai.

“And you told me that there was a thin line of metaphor and I was straddling it badly, and that if we were being accurate, I’d done that to my _own_ balls, and I told you your facetiousness was my least favourite thing about you, and you hung up on me,” Lance tells her.

Bobbi raises an eyebrow. “You _do_ remember,” she says, sounding a little bemused, a little impressed.

“I’ve only forgotten _most_ of it,” Lance replies.

There’s a silence.

“I think I preferred it when you were calling each other ridiculous names,” Trip says, from the other end of the table.

“This is deeply disconcerting,” Simmons agrees.

“Try hanging out with them for the best part of a decade,” Mack says gloomily and Fitz, sitting beside him, actually smiles. He’s using a fork instead of chopsticks, but he’s actually contributed a few things to the table conversation; you know, until Bobbi and Lance dominated it. At least this time they’re making less noise than usual. May still looks a little like she wants to throttle them both, but that’s just her general expression when it comes to Lance, and Coulson might actually be smiling into his cardboard carton.

“You love us really, Mack,” Lance says, reaching for his water glass. The rest of the team are drinking beer with their takeaway, but Bobbi pointedly put glasses of water in front of herself and Lance and this feels like one of those arguments he might put off and not have today after all.

“Hmmm,” is all Mack has to offer, and the others laugh, and the discussion moves on.

Lance looks at Bobbi, who’s looking at him, her ankle pressed to his beneath the table. He thinks he’s never really changed the way he looks at her, not since he was younger and more hopeful and first saw a woman on the pier, her golden hair shining silver in the moonlight, her face upturned and radiant, and thought: _yes, her_. Bobbi smiles a little, one of the private ones she doesn’t give out very often, just enough to kick his heart a little and make him feel like the lovestruck idiot he was once, will maybe always be. He doesn’t know if her feelings for him have matured at all; his definitely haven’t.

They were naïve when they were younger, and naïve even when they got older and divorced and somehow thought that that would be an end to it, they’d never have to see each other again. In truth, they’ll always keep running into each other, you played it for her, you can play it for me; if she can stand it, I can. It’s entirely possible that this will never be over.

Lance winks, Bobbi laughs at everything and nothing, and for a moment it’s like they might get away with it this time, they’ve even forgotten that they technically learned better in a hundred bruised fists and bruised emotions.

There’s a last time for everything, after all. One of these days, he might even start believing it.

**Author's Note:**

> a) If anyone's interested (ha), this was basically written to my Lance Hunter soundtrack of 90s Britpop and Matchbox Twenty, so if you're trying to write him too, that's my advice.
> 
> b) I love Huntingbird a lot, but also I've managed to make myself embarrassingly attached to Hunter (look, I just watched 3 seasons of _Trollied_ for Nick Blood, I'm doomed) and I don't really have that many Lance people, so if you want to be my frand and talk to me about him, hit me up at paperclipbitch or neitherusenorornament at tumblr, or @shehulking on twitter (I'm locked but I'll add you). *desperate puppy pathetic face*


End file.
